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Wednesday, 9 June 2010

Welcome to Kingdom Conspiracy

Welcome to Kingdom Conspiracy! I hope you'll join the ride here and be inspired, challenged, maybe educated a wee bit and most of all encouraged in your Jesus following. I hope as time goes on, through conversation and interaction, we'll become co-conspirators to lift up the name of Jesus and his kingdom in this new 'post-Christendom, post-everything' age. In a day where 'the left' and 'the right' of Christianity seem equally unappealing, I'm convinced that Jesus is the way. Re-calibrating around the Lord Jesus, I suspect, will be the uniting and strengthening of the church in this time...giving him his rightful place as the head of the church and living out our call to be his body.

The last few months, since last October really, have probably seen the most radical shake-up of my own life and 'ministry'. I set myself the task, after nearly 10 years leading Salvation Army churches of asking the big questions that had been appearing again and again in my heart and mind. The long and short of it, is that I have around 5 weeks left as a Salvation Army officer. My exploration of leadership, discipleship, 'churchmanship', the theology of mission and the incarnation have brought me to a place that The Army could see working....so I 'resigned' on the premise that there was so much of the journey that I could neither dismiss nor fully reconcile with where I was at. In any case, leaders in the Army couldn't see how there was a place for me so even the ways I thought might work weren't going to happen.

Truth is, I'm a Salvo at heart and Salvo thinking and people will probably continue to shape my life but there is something bigger at stake for me. In my old blog I put out a bit of a confessional about the ways I'd become side-tracked, almost institutionalised by the role I was in. It was starting to feel as if something else, other than Jesus, was becoming central and so I felt I had to strip away. One of the other titles I thought about for this blog was 'The Naked Salvo' - because I really want to look at the bare essentials of fleshing out Jesus faith in my life. (However, I really didn't want to constantly inflict the image of me without a shirt on...so thought of something much more suitable!)

The author Frank Viola, in his book 'Finding Organic Church' advises that no-one should embark on any form of Christian leadership until they are thirty. It sounds weird at first, and even slightly "Jesus-was-thirty-when-he-started-his-ministry" type of statement...like a sort of 'What would Jesus do?' gone mad. I read on and discovered that it was little to do with that, but more about the cycles of life which we all go through. Psychologists suggest that pretty much every person, when they reach 30, gets to the stage of re-evaluating all that they did in their twenties and truly start to know what they want their life to be about. Maybe the first of the mid-life crises! I'm not ashamed to confess I'm in that place still.

I want my life to be about empowering others to follow Jesus above all else. I want to live out kingdom conspiracy 'to the ends of the earth!' Hope you join in.

6 comments:

I like the point about getting back to Jesus. We get caught up in the whole church/institutional thing too often. Have you heard of the new book The Jesus Manifesto? Same author with Leonard Sweet. Looks interesting. Anyway, I'll be following and I'm looking forward to reading more about your journey.